Liber AL - a Feast for the Three Days

"Aiwass, uttering the word Thelema (with all its implications), destroys completely the formula of the Dying God."

This month the local community of Thelema celebrates a Feast for the Three
Days of the Writing of the Book of the Law, meeting to read Liber AL together
on each of the three days of the ninety-second anniversary of its original
transcription. Join us at Oz House on Monday evening 8th April for chapter
one, "the manifestation of Nuit" -- phone ahead at (510) 654-3580 for to Oz.
The following evening we will be at the Ancient Ways store for chapter two,
"the hiding of Hadit" -- come to 4075 Telegraph Avenue (at 41st Street) or call
the store at (510) 653-3244. For "the reward of Ra Hoor Khuit" on Wednesday
evening 10th April, chapter three will be read at Rosslyn Camp in Hayward,
which is located at 1471 "B" Street (an easy walk from BART) -- call (510) 886-
9642 for details. The readings will each begin at 8:00, with attendance open
to all; please bring contributions of bread, cheese, wine, fruit, or other
informal foods to be shared afterwards.

"The Book of the Law reconciles an impersonal and infinite interpretation of the cosmos with an egocentric and practical viewpoint, so it makes 'infinite space' speak in the language of a goddess and deals with the details of eating and drinking."

Merry Pranks of Tyl Ulenspiegl

Celebrate the flowing of the sap this spring with Tyl Ulenspiegl on Sunday
7th April (known to fertile thumpers and egg-hunters alike as "Beaster"
Sunday). Meet at Oz House before noon to pool transportation up into the
Berkeley hills for the ritual of "Tyl Ulenspiegl at the Easter of the Sap,"
adapted by our brother Lew from the nineteenth-century Flemish folk-novel by
Charles de Coster. Bring your contributions for our great picnic feast,
packed to be carried a short distance on foot to the secret site, and bring
outdoor costumes for taking part in the thousands of supporting roles
available in this production. (Elemental and spring-time themes are
suggested, but you can't go wrong as a well-armed bug, according to the
script.) We'll give the King of Spring his golden axe and his naked Queen,
and see if we can't bring sad silly Tyl and his sweet country maiden Nele
safely together. Call Lew at Oz during the preceding week for specific
details.

Also on the subject of spring-time holidays, we look forward at the
beginning of next month to a great weekend of Beltane, with the sun going 15°
Taurus just before midnight on Saturday evening 4th May. Contact the lodge or
Oz House to assist in planning a bonfire on the beach that evening, with
feasting and music.

Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica

Join the members of Thelema Lodge at Hours Temple in Oakland any Sunday
evening at 8:00 to participate in our weekly celebration of the Gnostic Mass,
which presents in concentrated symbolic form not only the essential secrets of
initiation, but also the basic laws of physics and biology. The mass not only
functions socially as a joyous gathering of the community, but also lays the
foundations for magical training and the wisdom of Thelema in those who
communicate together. For visitors to Thelema Lodge, one of the best
opportunities to meet the members and see our temple and library facilities is
to attend mass here some Sunday evening. If you have not attended recently,
please check in ahead of time by calling (510) 652-3171 for directions and
information. For members wishing to serve as officers in future masses, the
lodgemaster can assist mass teams to arrange their dates on the temple
schedule, and will recommend the further guidance of one of our local Gnostic
Bishops if requested.

Thelema Lodge recently hosted a Gnostic Mass performance that
was videotaped for broadcast on television in Chile. The Saturday morning
mass on 24th February featured Casey Cummings as Priestess, with Michael
Sanborn as Priest and Frater Maeldinas Emrys as Deacon. It was surprisingly
well attended (for a morning event), especially considering that we also had
good turnouts for the mass at Oz the previous evening, and the regular public
mass the following day. Patrice (Pato) Livingstone of Luna Calipso Film &
Television brought the video crew (Alessandra, Raul, and Miguel) to this
specially arranged mass after having attended a regular Sunday evening service
about a month earlier. Although the presence of a roving videocamera in the
temple was certainly unusual, they were most respectful, and managed to
achieve a high degree of intimacy without interfering. The novelty of the
situation seemed to make it enjoyable for everyone, with the crew even passing
their big camera back and forth so that they could each communicate at the
end. The mass was followed by a video interview with the priest and then a
late breakfast for the crew. Their footage is scheduled to appear in a
Chilean news report about contemporary religious diversity sometime this
autumn.

M M M

Thelema Lodge will be holding initiations for advancement in Ordo Templi
Orientis this month on Saturday 27th April, through the afternoon and into the
evening, with a feast to follow. Members are asked to contact the lodge for
details of time and degree; in order to attend please speak with one of the
lodge officers ahead of time. The Order accepts applications for initiation,
which may be turned over to the lodgemaster for forwarding to the O.T.O.
Initiation Secretary. It takes a minimum of forty days to schedule
initiation, so candidates should confer with the lodge as soon as they
determine on advancement, and should keep in touch thereafter.

Classes and Events

Bill Heidrick's Tarot series open this month, meeting in San Anselmo on
Wednesday evening 17th April, beginning at 7:30. The first meeting will give
an introduction to Tarot and explore the European and other antecedents of the
mysteries.

The Section Two reading group will be looking this month at the last and
greatest achievement of the medieval romance tradition of Arthur, the
archetypal King of Britain, as collected and translated in the mid-fifteenth
century by Sir Thomas Malory. Join Caitlin at Oz House on Monday evening 22nd
April at 8:00 for a discussion of the myth and magic of the Arthurian world,
with selected readings from one of the greatest early masters of narrative
prose in our language. Collecting most of his stories from the elaborate
French prose romances of Arthur's knights, Malory concentrated on their
essential elements, organizing them in dynamic progressions (as in a novel)
instead of interweaving brief incidents in the tapestry fashion of the
romances. Although his view of the supernatural tends to skepticism, his
presentation of the magical aspects of the story is intensified by the direct
precise details of the marvels he does recount. Malory's Works, written
during many years of imprisonment following a career of violent outlawry, do
not make a single unified Arthuriad, but a sequence of tales, unified in style
and manner rather than in design and structure. The splendors of chivalric
fraternity which he presents are among the core values of western
civilization, but he recounts them with a haunting undertone of elegy, a sense
of approaching ruin and of the fall of princes, which reminds us often of the
proximity of chaos.

The John Dee reading group meets with Clay Holden on Monday evening 15th
April at 8:00 in the library at Thelema Lodge. The April meeting will be
devoted to a review of the construction of the Sigillum Dei ímeth as described
in Liber Mysteriorum Secundus over the past few months of our reading. From
data gathered in their spiritual experiments of March 1582, Dee and Kelly
worked out the design of this new universal talisman, a sigillum dei or basic
magical tool in the Solomonic ars notoria tradition which Kelly seems to have
studied. Its essential shape was adapted from a heptagonal and pentagonal
seal in Dee's manuscript copy of Liber Juratus, a Solomonic catalogue of
spiritual names and powers. Dee was one of the greatest masters of geometric
construction of his time, as well as the leading English collector of wax
seals and authority on the design of seals, so that he was able to construct
the most complex and comprehensive sigillum dei known to the Renaissance. In
Dee's hands, the rough and clumsy tradition of grimoire figures developed into
a precise mathematical instrument for organizing and manipulating the names
and virtues of the discarnate praeterhuman intelligences of the spiritual
universe. The John Dee Society has produced some outstandingly clear
computer-generated representations of Dee's sigil, and will have blank
outlines of the figure available to be filled in according to the angelic
directions we have been studying.

Join Grace on Friday evening 26th April for the Thelema Lodge Astrological Cycles workshop as we turn our attention to the influence of Luna. The
powerful pull of the Moon on the fluid balance of personality, and its
involvement with memory and imagination, make it one of the most meaningful of
the celestial cycles. Indeed the lunar cycle is so basic to human experience
that it is usually cited as the best evidence for astrological influence on
our lives. Bring your natal chart (or birth data so that one can be cast for
you), and we will examine the meaning of Luna in the horoscope in all its
contexts. Beginning at 7:00, the discussion will be open to all, and will be
held at Grace's Palace of Astrology in Berkeley. All who attend are asked to speak first with Grace; either let her know ahead of time that you plan to be
there, or call her at (510) 843-STAR before setting forth.

The "Angelmas" Enochian liturgy group has no activity on the schedule for
April, but those interested or involved in this enterprise are urged to
contact Michael Sanborn at (510) 601-9393 to confer regarding activities in
May. Further work on scrying technique with Susan is being planned, along
with rehearsal and celebration of the "Angelmas" liturgy.

Library nights at Thelema Lodge are Thursday evening 4th April and Tuesday
evening 23rd April at 8:00; please call ahead to confirm the library schedule,
which can often be changed by request. The lodge luncheon meeting will be
Sunday afternoon 21st April from 12:30 until 2:30. Please call ahead, then
join us for lunch at the lodge.

Sirius Oasis will meet in northern Berkeley on Monday evening 29th April at
8:00. Call for directions to the master's home at (510) 525-2855. Plans are
being laid this spring for the Rites of Eleusis, for a Sirius Oasis
celebration of the Gnostic Mass, and for the Ancient Ways Festival at Harbin
Hot Springs early in June.

The Vindication of Nietzsche

by Aleister Crowley

All delicate days and pleasant, all spirits and sorrows are castFar out with the foam of the present that sweeps to the surf of the past:Where beyond the extreme sea-wall, and between the remote sea-gates,Waste water washes, and tall ships founder, and deep death waits:Where, mighty with deepening sides, clad about with the seas as with wings,And impelled of invisible tides, and fulfilled of unspeakable things,White-eyed and poisonous-finned, shark-toothed and serpentine-curled,Rolls, under the whitening wind of the future, the wave of the world.

IT IS eleven of the clock on the night of August 28, in the 1914th year of the
Christian Era, and the news of the annihilation of the British Army has not
yet reached London. It will come.1

The cause is cant and hypocrisy, and the cause of the War was cant and
hypocrisy, the strange, the pathetic, the craven determination to admit no
fact for truth which all the men of science and all the poets of the reign of
Queen Victoria did so little to shake. The demonstrations of Darwin and the
sonorities of Swinburne reached only the thinking classes, if one may use so plural a noun for the remnant that refused to bow the knee to the Baal of
Respectability and the Golden Calf of Commercialism.

Entrenched in the morass of bibliolatry, crouching in the bastions of Fort
Grundy, the Old Guard of Victorianism died and did not surrender. But as the
Old Testament God fell before Paine and Ingersoll, as the sanguine and
sacrificial Christ was emasculated by Renan and Edward Arnold, the ruin of
orthodoxy left even the manhood of Puritanism eunuch. Havelock with his
bloody sword blowing 14,000 Sepoy prisoners from the muzzles of his guns in a
morning became no longer thinkable. Hypocrisy surpasses itself, denounced its
own virtues for vices. As the Goddess Reason once presided in Paris over
panic, so the neuter deity Progress was worshipped by all those whom sloth,
ease, security, prosperity had rotted. And the attendant demon-in-chief,
Broken-Reed-in-Waiting to Its Majesty, was Humanitarianism.

We had Progressed. Lady Pyjama Noisette had a headache to the tune of a
paragraph -- 10 lines. Sandsugar v. Sandsugar and Pintpot -- a column. A
piddling little quack doctor poisons his bitch of a wife and runs off with his
fool of a typist -- the business of the world is suspended until he is
cinematographically hanged.

A prominent writer calls attention to himself by the device of calling
attention to the pangs of slaughtered oxen; another affirms his brotherhood
with the Chicago Pig. Countless thousands turn Vegetarian, and then quarrel
as to whether it is or is not True Vegetarianism to eat eggs. The war between
the Fruitarians and the Nut-foodists nearly came to a cross word! I knew a
"man" who refused to eat bread because it was a fermented drink! A friend of
mine knew an Anarchist who refused cocoa because it excited his animal
passions! "And all the while the shark in southern seas!" as the authoress of
The Placid Pug so tragically counters.

For there were one or two reprobates who happened to have read History, and
to have observed Humanity.

Of these Nietzsche was the chief. But even in England, independently of
him, and ignorant of his teaching, was found a man who actually endeavoured --
and is still endeavouring2 -- to found a New Religion on such texts as these:

"For these fools of men and their woes care not thou at all! They feel little; what is, is balanced by weak joys; but ye are my chosen ones."

"But to love me is better than all things: if under the night-stars in the desert thou presently burnest mine incense before me, invoking me with a pure heart, and the serpent flame therein, thou shalt come a little to lie in my bosom. For one kiss wilt thou then be willing to give all; but whoso gives one particle of dust shall lose all in that hour. Ye shall gather goods and store of women and spices; ye shall wear rich jewels; ye shall exceed the nations of {the} earth in splendour and pride; but always in the love of me, and so shall ye come to my joy. I charge you earnestly to come before me in a single robe, and covered with a rich head-dress. I love you! I yearn to you! Pale or purple, veiled or voluptuous, I who am all pleasure and purple, and drunkenness of the innermost sense, desire you. Put on the wings, and arouse the coiled splendour within you: come unto me!

"At all my meetings with you shall the priestess say -- and her eyes shall burn with desire as she stands bare and rejoicing in my secret temple -- To me! To me! calling forth the flame of the hearts of all in her love-chant.

"I am the blue-lidded daughter of Sunset; I am the naked brilliance of the voluptuous night-sky.

"To me! To me!"

"These are dead, these fellows; they feel not. We are not for the poor and for the {sic} sad; the lords of the earth are our kinsfolk.

"Is a God to live in a dog? No! but the highest are of us. They shall rejoice, our chosen: who sorroweth is not of us."Beauty and strength, leaping laughter and delicious languor, force and fire, are of us.

"We have nothing with the outcast and the unfit: let them die in their misery. For they feel not. Compassion is the vice of kings: stamp down the wretched and the weak: this is the law of the strong: this is our law and the joy of the world. Think not, O king, upon that lie: That Thou Must Die: verily thou shalt not die, but live. Now let it be understood: if {sic} the body of the King dissolve, he shall remain in pure ecstasy for ever. Nuit! Hadit! Ra-Hoor-Khuit! The Sun, Strength and Sight, Light; these are for the servants of the Star and the Snake.

"I am the Snake that giveth Knowledge and Delight and bright glory, and stir the hearts of men with drunkenness. To worship me take wine and strange drugs whereof I will tell my prophet, and be drunk thereof! They shall not harm ye at all. It is a lie, this folly against self. The exposure of innocence is a lie. Be strong, Man! {sic} lust, enjoy all things of sense and rapture: fear not that any God shall deny thee for this."

"Ye are against the people, O my chosen!

"If Will stops and cries Why, invoking Because, then Will stops and does nought.

"If Power asks Why, then is Power weakness."

"Pity not the fallen! I never knew them. I am not for them. I console not: I hate the consoled and the consoler."

"There is a veil; that veil is black. It is the veil of the modest woman; it is the veil of sorrow, and the pall of death: this is none of me. Tear down that lying spectre of the centuries: veil not your vices in virtuous words: these vices are my service; ye do well, and I will reward you here and hereafter."

"Beware therefore! Love all, lest perchance is a King concealed! Say you so? Fool! If he be a King, thou canst not hurt him.

"Therefore strike hard and low, and to hell with them, master!"

"Now let it be first understood that I am a god of War and of Vengeance. I shall deal hardly with them.

"Worship me with fire and blood; worship me with swords and with spears. Let the woman be girt with a sword before me: let blood flow to my name. Trample down the Heathen: be upon them, O warrior, I will give you of their flesh to eat!"

"Mercy let be off: damn them who pity! Kill and torture; spare not; be upon them!

"Them that seek to entrap thee, to overthrow thee, them attack without pity or quarter; and destroy them utterly. Swift as a trodden serpent turn and strike! Be thou yet deadlier than he! Drag down their souls to awful torment: laugh at their fear: spit upon them!"

"I am in a secret fourfold word, the blasphemy against all gods of men.

"Curse them! Curse them! Curse them!

"With my Hawk's head I peck at the eyes of Jesus as he hangs upon the cross.

"I flap my wings in the face of Mohammed and blind him.

"With my claws I tear out the flesh of the Indian and the Buddhist, Mongol and Din."Bahlasti! Ompehda! I spit on your crapulous creeds.

"Let Mary inviolate be torn upon wheels: for her sake let all chaste women be utterly despised among you!

"Also for beauty's sake and love's!

"Despise also all cowards; professional soldiers who dare not fight, but play: all fools despise!

"But the keen and the proud, the royal and the lofty: ye are brothers!

"As brothers fight ye!"

"There is no law beyond Do what thou wilt."

This is plain speaking; this is "blasphemy" and "immorality" if ever such
were spoken.

I quote it in preference to Nietzsche, not only because Nietzsche has
penetrated from Prussia to Pimlico, and is quoted in Streatham as in
Stuttgart, but also because it is simpler than Nietzsche, because there is no
possibility of misinterpreting the doctrine (were I dowered with a double
portion of the Spirit of Escobar), because it is not German or Slavonic but
universal, the battle-cry of what may yet become a new and terrible theocracy.
Its adherents have hitherto been secret; today they surely lift their heads;
tomorrow they may reap the reward of having thought ten years ago what England
thinks this year.

It is only two months since even the saner sections of the people were
disputing hotly as to whether boxing is "brutal"; and this month no man of
sense but admits that little children may lawfully be pitched into blazing
cottages before their mothers' eyes. And that is play to what may come. Will
not human flesh be bought and sold in the markets before the war and its
attendant revolutions are over? Is there any man bold enough to call such
things "impossible," to invoke those fallen fishy gods "Progress" and
"Civilization" and "The Higher Awakening of the Ethical Instincts of Man?"

Notes1. P.S. It came; and was censored. But England will yet find out.

P.P.S. It was not until after Victory had been proclaimed that men

began to realize that it was Defeat. For the corruption of Christianity made

them cowards even in conquest, refusing to assume the responsibility of

Mastership.
2 P.S. Dec. 1923 e.v. He has perdured with dogged dauntlessness through

distress and disaster of every kind: and his Truth is subtly infiltrating the

whole Body of the World's Thought. Every year marks an advance -- inscrutable

and automatic -- towards acceptance. The quotations are from Liber AL the

An Introduction to Qabalah

Last month's discussion used an allegory related to traditional human
families, but there are those who try to employ that allegory as a way of
representing the four worlds of the Qabalah on the Tree of Life. The Golden
Dawn attempted that. They said that the fourth world was Malkut, the third
world was made up of the six Sephirot from Yesod through Chesed, the first and
second worlds were the Mother at Binah and the Father at Chokmah, while Keter
was beyond all the four worlds. That approach mixes one explanation with
another. Here's what may have led to the confusion. The system described
last month, with the countenances and the grouping of the Sephirot, is often
related to the letters of the name Jehovah put on the Tree. The little dot of
the tip of the letter , the first letter of , belongs to Keter. The is
for Chokmah, the first is Binah, takes care of the intervening six
Sephirot, and the last is down in Malkut. These same letters were called Father, Mother, Son and Daughter in a traditional analysis of the name .
Since there are four worlds that match those letters, and since those letters
are also used for this system of explanation, it's a simple thing to make a
mistake and assume that they represent the same idea. This is not so. has
the number value of Ten. has the value of five. Ten plus five make
fifteen. Fifteen can be reduced by adding its digits as 1 + 5 = 6, and six is
the number value of . The Father, , and the Mother, , joined together
produce the Son which is . That's an example of how that association can be
made on number significance, not simply the fact that these letters can also
match the four worlds. Here's a different system that allocates the four
worlds to the Tree of Life: First , then -, next --, and finally ---. Arranged in a triangle, this depicts a tetractys:

Track this pattern down the Tree of Life. The first goes to Keter (1).
The - goes to Chokmah (2) and Binah (3), in order. The -- goes in order
to Chesed (4), Geburah (5) and Tipheret (6). Finally, each letter of ---
is attributed to the remaining four Sephirot in Order, from Netzach to Malkut.
Taking the four rows from this tetractys as the four worlds: Keter is Atzilut,
Chokmah and Binah are Briah, Yetzriah is Chesed with Geburah and Tipharet,
while Assiah combines all the last four Sephirot. This procedure also
produces the elemental qualities of the pillars. The right hand pillar is of
fire because it has all 's in it. The left hand pillar is of water because
it has all 's in it. Fire is emotion in the sense of rising up and
generating power. Water in Qabalah is more a thing of thinking, since the
flowing of thought is steadier and slower than the leaping of the emotions.
In the middle pillar we see the of Air predominating between Fire at the top
and Earth at the bottom. All of these different things are workable patterns
to help explain the structure of the Tree of Life.

There is a pattern involved in the Tree of Life that can be useful for
initiation. The Order of the Golden Dawn designed temple initiations to make
use of this, but they made a few changes in the way the Jewish Kabbalah dealt
with the Tree. Here's an example. The Order of the Golden Dawn placed the
veil (Paroket) just below Tipheret. It doesn't belong there but in the Abyss
in the old Jewish systems, as the Veil of the Temple. The Abyss is the gap
between the outer Temple and the inner Temple, the Holy of Hollies. In the
Temple of Solomon there was a double veil and a person had to zig-zag between
the two sections. That zig-zag was a moment of preparation before going into
the holiest place, a time of passage through the abyss between worlds. The
Golden Dawn placed it differently to emphasize their preferred use of the Tree
of Life as an initiation pattern. New members or Neophytes were down Malkut.
They were taken through formal lodge initiations where the rooms would be
decorated with symbols of the Sephirot. An initiation for Yesod would start
in a part of the room that symbolized Malkut. There were paths or portals to
the left (), center (), and right (). The candidate would be turned back
from the left path by an officer with a symbol of fire, since that was the
path of , and likewise from the right path with an appropriate symbol for .
Finally the candidate would be permitted to enter the path of Tau into Yesod.
The last of these outer initiations in the Order of the Golden Dawn was into
the Sephirot Tipharet. As the inner sanctum or vault of the Adepts, that
place needed a special division from the mundane side of things and the temple
veil was used for that bit of symbolism. Such lodge initiations have certain
advantages, particularly in that someone checks the progress and a fairly
systematic approach enables the candidate to share the experiences of others.

-oOo-

Last month in the essay "Absinthe -- The Green Goddess" which appeared in our "Crowley Classics" section we appended a translation of "La Legende de
l'Absinthe," the French sonnet which is quoted in full by Crowley in that article, and which he may himself have authored anonymously. (At least no other pedigree for the poem has been discovered.) Further study of this poem, in consultation with several lodge members, has improved our reading of the sonnet so much that a revised translation is here offered. This should be compared with the French text given in our March issue.

The Legend of Absinthe

Apollo, who mourned at Hyacinthe's demise,

Refused to concede this victory to Death.

Much better that the soul, adept in flight,

Had in its beauty found a holier alchemy.

Thus with his heavenly hand he drained and crushed

The subtlest harvest of the garden goddess,

The broken bodies of the herbs yielding a golden essence

From which we measure out the drop -- of Absinthe!

In lowly hovels and in glittering courts,

Alone, in pairs, drink up this fluid of attraction!

For it is a magical operation -- as one might say --

When the pale opal wine interrupts all misery,

The product of beauty's intimate sanctuary --

Enchant my heart, and captivate my soul!

THE CORNERSTONE

"At the time of the '[Boston] Tea Party,' St. Andrew's Lodge was meeting
regularly in what was called the 'Long Room' of Freemasons Hall, formerly the
'Green Dragon' tavern. The Lodge shared this room, and much of its
membership, with a burgeoning number of politically-oriented secret societies
and quasi-masonic clandestine fraternities dedicated to opposing British
fiscal legislation . . . Another even more militant organization was the
'Sons of Liberty' and its inner nucleus, the so-called 'Loyal Nine,' who
advocated violence and had been fomenting riots, demonstrations, and other
forms of civil disobedience since 1765 . . . At least three of the 'Loyal
Nine' were also freemasonic brethren of St. Andrew's.

"The 'Tea Party' moreover, could not have occurred without the active
collusion of two detachments of colonial militia who were supposed to be
guarding the Dartmouth's cargo. Of these men, the captain of the first
detachment, Edward Proctor, had been a member of St. Andrew's Lodge since
1663. Three of his men -- Stephen Bruce, Thomas Knox, and Paul Revere, were
also members of the Lodge . . . Altogether, nineteen members out of forty-
eight in the two militia detachments are known to have collaborated in dumping
the Dartmouth's tea. Of these nineteen, six including the detachment
commander were members of St. Andrew's and three more were members of the
'Loyal Nine.'"

"Men of vision realized that another step must be taken if the weak
confederation of American States was to become a strong, unified nation.
Again Freemasonry set the pattern in ideology and form, since the Masonic
federal system of organization was the only pattern for effective organization
operating in each of the thirteen colonies, it was natural that patriotic
brethren intent on strengthening the fledgling nation should turn to the
organizational base of the Craft for a model. Regardless of other forces that
affected the formation of the Constitution during the Constitutional
Convention in 1787, the fact remains that the federalism established in the
civil government the Constitution created is identical to the federation of
the Grand Lodge system of masonic government created in Anderson's
Constitutions of 1723."

The Primary Sources column will return next month. Space did not allow it this time.

From the Outbasket

Here are the annual demographics of the O.T.O. from Agape Grand
Lodge. These membership totals have been obtained from Grand Lodge
accounts at the end of February 1996 e.v.: 3,074 all, 2,684 of which
are initiates. The International O.T.O. financial statement for
fiscal year 1995-1996 e.v. will be available toward the end of April.
For a copy, enclose an SASE and write to: O.T.O. Annual Financial
Statement, Ordo Templi Orientis, P.O.Box 430, Fairfax, CA 94978 USA

Total figures are c. 10% inflated owing to a late dues billing
cycle.

ADV

104

Associates

286

Minervals

889

Ist Degrees

700

IInd Degrees

441

IIIrd Degrees

296

IVth Degrees

204

Vth Degrees

113

Higher Degrees

41

--oOo--

In the list which follows, all data is drawn from the Grand Lodge
mailing list. Accordingly, the actual membership total here is less
than the total count, owing to changing and lost addresses.

Known OTO member addresses by regions at end February 1996 e.v.
(Associates and initiates both) Total: 2,623 in 40 countries.